Overview and Results from NASA’s Break The Ice Lunar Challenge

NASA’s Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing (PCC) program portfolio is designed to connect the public to the agency’s missions. The program encourages creative solutions from a diverse range of solvers which serve to advance the agency’s technology development efforts. PCC includes NASA Centennial Challenges, which invites the general public to help close specific NASA technology gaps and incentivizes participation by awarding the Challenge winners large cash prizes for successful outcomes. Centennial Challenges seeks broad participation from independent inventors, companies, nonprofits, small businesses, student groups, and even international entities.

NASA executed the Break The Ice Lunar Challenge as part of the Centennial Challenges Program between 2020 and 2024. This Challenge focused on advancing technologies capable of (1) excavating tough icy-regolith, or icy Lunar soil, and (2) transporting that excavated material to a different location on the Lunar surface. Phase 1 of NASA's Break The Ice Lunar Challenge required competing teams to conceptualize a high-level system architecture capable of excavating buried icy-regolith and transporting either icy-regolith or processed water
several kilometers across the Lunar surface. Phase 2 of the Challenge required competing teams to design, build, and demonstrate robotic technologies capable of excavating simulated icy-regolith material and transporting it across a simulated Lunar landscape.

This paper provides details about the development and execution of the Challenge, the results of each Challenge Phase, and a discussion of the significance of the technology developed under the Challenge for NASA’s exploration goals.